Film Reviews

The first follow-up to 'Men in Black', ten years ago, seemed to be running on empty. It was the embodiment of everything that’s wrong with sequels, whereas this one won me over completely. Why? For one thing, after a decade’s absence, I enjoyed revisiting the characters of Agents J (Will Smith) and ...

I really wanted to like this film. I respect Wes Anderson and his distinctive voice as a writer-director ('Rushmore' is one of my favorite films of the 1990s), but this latest endeavor is so precious and self-aware that it nearly smothers itself.

Last year, Harvey Weinstein brought a French film called 'The Artist' to the U.S. and wound up with an armful of Academy Awards. This year he’s presenting another Gallic import that not only was a box-office smash, but features Omar Sy, who beat out Jean Dujardin for the Best Actor prize at the Césa...

Finally, Hollywood has produced a movie for people who found the 'Transformers' series too intellectually challenging. This shouldn’t come as a complete surprise, since 'Battleship' is not based on a novel, or a magazine article, but a board game.

I’m as susceptible as anyone to watching highly attractive people onscreen, which this movie has in abundance, but it took time for 'What to Expect When You’re Expecting' to win me over. I found some of its multiple storylines annoying and hopelessly contrived, at first; it’s only toward the end, wh...

Understandably, this R-rated comedy is being promoted as the story of how the vibrator came to be invented. That’s not untrue, but what makes 'Hysteria' so entertaining is the larger picture it paints of repressed Victorian society. That it does so in the form of a farcical comedy makes it all the m...

'Polisse' is a sprawling but vivid portrait of the Paris police department’s Child Protection Unit, a tight-knit group of colleagues whose emotionally draining work (like protecting children from sexual predators within their own family) affects their private lives as well as their relationships on ...

As someone who was completely disarmed by 'Borat', then disappointed by' Bruno', I hoped Sacha Baron Cohen’s latest comedy would hit that sweet spot again, especially since he is working with his longtime collaborators, director Larry Charles and writers Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer. I...

It makes sense that for Johnny Depp and director Tim Burton to get in on the current vampire craze, they’d have to approach it with a sense of humor. I doubt if many young viewers know that they’ve based their new film on a forty-year-old daytime TV drama, and it scarcely matters. Dark S...

If every summer blockbuster or comic-book movie were as good as 'Marvel’s The Avengers' I’d greet the upcoming release slate with a lot more enthusiasm…but there aren’t many writer-directors as talented as Joss Whedon. Indeed, it’s the writing that sets this film apart...